Crash cut to Kevin Bacon dancing in an abandoned warehouse.

No More One-Offs – Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

Backstep. So Eggsy (Taron Egerton) and the Kingsman are back. When their headquarters in England get destroyed and a new global threat emerges, they have to relocate to the United States to get help from the American secret service: the Statesman. Now the first Kingsman was a gigantic surprise. Nobody was expecting much from a riff on the ever popular James Bond franchise, and it ended up being a big time crowd pleaser. But just like every movie that overperforms, the studios can’t leave well enough alone. You have to strike while the iron is hot, even if you don’t have fresh ideas, and this is a sequel that could have benefited greatly from a re-write or two.

Hey, weren’t you supposed to be dead?

Now this isn’t really a spoiler, as the trailers to this make no mistake in showing you this, but Colin Firth is back. This is only a spoiler for the first movie, but as you may recall, he got shot in the face at point-blank range. This is not some long-lost twin brother or a clone, this is the same character that is back. The reasoning behind it is flimsy at best, and it ends up cheapening a brutal moment from the first movie. This is all the more proof that this sequel was never at any point planned beforehand, so it makes sense for them to come to America for some new characters… which brings me to my next point. If you watch the trailers for this, they promise you Jeff Bridges and Channing Tatum as American cowboy spies. I sincerely hope you didn’t watch this movie for either of them, because they are barely in this. It’s maybe 15 – 20 minutes at most, and in a movie that is well over two hours long, that’s not a lot of screen time.

My apologies, ladies.

This is not all bad. The action is pretty well choreographed, although that has never been a problem for director Matthew Vaughn. I also like Pedro Pascal in the role of the one American that you do actually get to spend time with. I did not care for Julianne Moore as the villain, and much like this story, her character did not seem very well thought out. This is nowhere near as strong of a plot, and it should come as no surprise that there was no comic book to go off of this time around, and this movie suffered for it. This sequel is overlong at almost two and a half hours, and with it being such a big step down with the story department, not even the action can save this.